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Some Pencil Sketches

All of these are at least several months old, with the exception of the spider-bunny.

An alien astronaut.
An alien being and a manticore.
A naked, bladed android man, and another manticore.
Some hastily colored alien primates.
A creature who started as a wolf man and ended up as a rat man. I used myself as a model, though I'm not nearly as muscular. Or hairy.
A made-up species of mammal-like reptile.
Some alien fauna.
Some more alien fauna.
My entry in the "cute bunny has eyes and mouthparts of a spider" sketch of the day.

The Land of Hu-Huffle

The Land of Hu-Huffle is a strange little world I made up. It began with this whimsical, Seus-ish painting. It's my first acrylic painting ever, so I apologise for the quality.

The rhyme, which I improvised, goes like this:In the land of Hu-Huffle
Where the Fluffles do shuffle
And their scuffles are muffled
In the land of Hu-Huffle

Here are some fluffles, the main species of Hu-Huffle. They grow on trees (the red antennae are their stems), and when they gain enough wisdom, they root themselves and grow into trees themselves, and thus begin the cycle anew. Their feet attach directly to their bodies; they have no legs. Hence the "shuffle". In this scene, the two fluffles are trying to catch a flying doigo in a net, but are only succeeding in catching each-other.

A drawing of a flying doigo. It has no wings, just four tiny little arms, so it relies on feathers that it finds to fly.

The sheep-like painterdoodle. It leaves a trail of brightly-colored paint wherever it goes. The expressions where a blast to draw.

Some Hu-Huffle flora and fauna. The legs, lower right, are the chief enemies of the legless fluffles. Luckily for the ungraceful fluffles, the predatory legs are the least intelligent lifeforms on Hu-Huffle.

I'm thinking of turning this all into a children's book one day. Maybe once I get a tablet I'll do it digitally. Of course, so as not to be just a cheap imitation of Dr. Seus, it won't be written in rhymes.

Some CoWs

Here's CoW #53, the Nuclear Planet Devourer. I think, so far, it's gotten one single vote. But that's only expected when you're up against people like rawwad and JakkaS and the various other extremely talented CoWers.

And here's CoW #54, the Sand Hunter. I was too late to turn in the final, but I don't mind.
Brainstorms of a dune-rolling bug and a shark-like sand swimmer.
The final, drawn in a gel pen, then painted over with acrylic, all on regular sketchbook paper, which was exceedingly unwise. I had to erase the ripples in the paper after I scanned it.
Here's the basic idea behind it: The wheel bug's planet is in a period of development roughly equivalent to our Silurian. The oceans are teaming with life and diversity, but the land is still relatively barren, home to only a few species of advanced vascular plants. As far as animals were concerned, dry land was the exclusive domain of a hardy group of centipede-like arthropods. This two-foot long creature is an advanced descendant of those pioneering species. The wheel bug is one of the first entirely terrestrial animals, not relying on water even for reproduction. Its eight pairs of long legs enable it to move quite fast over its dry, sandy habitat in pursuit of its prey, but this mode of movement leads to rapid loss of precious moisture. Its preferred method of hunting is to perch itself atop a sand dune and ambush its prey, which often congregates to gather the dew that collects in the troughs between dunes. The wheel bug launches itself foreward and rolls down the hill, hoping to colide with and injure its prey with the rows of serrated spikes along its back. It aims specifically for animals that have recently shed their exoskeletons, making themselves much softer and more vulnerable. Though ingenious, the evolutionary trend of its prey to develop larger bodies and stronger hides will soon make this method of hunting quite impractical. The wheel bug, like all of nature's creatures, will either adapt or perish.

Thanks, Saikin! Yeah, more variations of study subjects is something I sorely need to force myself to do. I'll post some of my still lives from school a little later. I'm taking a life drawing class this fall, so I'll post those too.

Interesting range of works in here. I'll see what I can do to crit your still lives, but be forwarned that my opinions about learning how to draw may be unsuitable to you, or just plain misguided

Skeleton+boots+cow skull: I'm not a big fan of isolating a particular drawing technique to complete a drawing, as it brings a lot of attention away from what you're actually seeing and makes you spend too much time making the technique pretty. I'd rather see you apply line emphasis, hatch lines, smooth light/shadow, and everything else you know about light and drawing on EVERY drawing you do, where it is deemed appropriate to your taste. If your goal is to represent an object on a piece of paper as realistically as possible, you would do well to keep everything in your arsenal at the ready.

I know your teachers probably assigned you to do them that way but now that you have, put all of those techniques into action with your own drawings, and you will find that the less you pay attention to technique, the more naturally they seem to be absolutely necessary when you are having trouble drawing something. You'll just feel it.

The final drawing does a pretty good job with textures, but my main problem with it is an incoherent light source. Why only fill in the background just enough to show the beaker's spherical form? To help recreate the light source, you should have filled in all of that background. If you did that, you would find that almost everything looked like the same blue mid-tone color. The flower is not just "really light" and the suitcase "really dark," every single object has an overall value that will be brighter (relative to the objects around it) the closer and more directly facing it is to the light source. Also, how would you deal with all those value planes if you used black paper? Or white?

I hope that gave you something useful, I'm not too confident in how clear that all was

Thanks, darkwolf. You're right, those drawings were assingments meant to isolate particular techniques. I completely agree with you about combining the different techniques to maximum affect. The thing is, once you practice something and internalize it, it will come out in your work whether you realize it or not. An analogy in my own life would be playing the guitar and hearing little bits and pieces of the music that I listen to coming out in what I play. I definitely agree with what you have to say.
As for the final drawing, the light source is probably incoherent because there were lights coming from all directions. It was a very large and complicated still life, and I only drew a small part. It was a high key drawing in the first place, and then spray fixing it toned down the white somewhat. I was more hesitant with contrast back then. The idea to do an outline of shading around everything was somewhat questionable as well, but I don't think I'd like it as much with the entire background filled in.
Thanks for the comments and crits, and yes, you were perfectly clear.

Hey look you got the tablet! Congratulations! I think you'll find it only gets more exciting from here. There are SO MANY ways to use it. I won't say it makes things "easier," but in a short time of using it regularly, and exlporing the software, you find yourself able to do things you might never have known how do to otherwise. One thing I've been doing lately is using the magnetic lasso tool to mark out a section of a painting and shifting the hues, saturations and lightness... both for coloring parts of a painting and defining the space a little, either to make it recede or to make it pop. Its a nice tool because you can make refinements in small but uniform increments, allowing you to tweak things quite precisely.

Congrats on your new investment. I'm looking forward to seeing how things develop!

Thanks, Michael! That's done all with a mouse, actually. I don't have a tablet yet. Feel free to hop on to San Luis Obispo county Craig's list and buy my electric ukulele, though, so I can get the money. Or not. I have a job now, too, so it won't be long. See you in CoW.